Near Field Communication (NFC) is a technology enabling many different kinds of useful services. In particular value based services have been discussed, such as payment, ticketing, physical access and coupons. In this type of services, there is a natural desire to implement the applications in a secure way.
One solution to securely implement an NFC application is to install the application on a secure element. An example of such a secure element could be the UICC (Universal Integrated Circuit Card) of a mobile equipment, but also other choices are possible such as a secure element embedded within the mobile equipment or a secure element in the form of a secure digital card.
The secure element is normally not managed by the end-user himself, but by some entity with which the end-user has a billing relationship (operator) or other relationship (terminal manufacturer).
It has been proposed that there is a need for a brokering entity between service providers utilizing the secure element and the entities managing the secure elements. This brokering entity is referred to as a Trusted Service Manager (TSM).
Today applications are loaded onto the SE at manufacturing time (this is the common way of managing SIMs (Subscriber Identity Module) and Eurocard-Mastercard-VISA (EMV) application. Some SEs however utilizes the Global Platform card management system. These SEs are referred to as multi application SEs. The Global Platform (GP) card management system is not dependent on any specific connection protocol to the SE, but is mostly used during manufacturing time. However, with the advent of mobile phones other means have surfaced, and it has recently been described how to use GP in conjunction with the SIM application toolkit. However, this leads to a system where the TSM needs to be a very complex entity that handles the various different types of low level communication and the different types of application logic.
The resulting TSM lacks much of the flexibility needed to adapt the TSM for the brokering role.